From
It Affects You
Dick Morris thinks Katrina and the Bush administration's disasterous handling of its aftermath are the gifts that keep on giving.
Yes, his reviews in the first days after the tempest hit are clearly bad and he obviously failed to anticipate the magnitude of the response the nation expected and the area needed -- but relief is a gift that keeps on giving.
Day after day after day, people will see a massive flow of federal aid to the hard-hit area. While the storm's intensity and the catastrophe it caused concentrated into a few days the horrific experiences of the poor victims, the rebuilding process will take months and years. This process, likely to become a theme for Bush's second term in the way 9/11 dominated his first one, will ultimately become a presidential strength.
It will not be long before Republican consultants like Morris are openly advising Bush to fuck up on a massive scale so that he can reap the political rewards from correcting those mistakes. Or, more accurately, so he can benefit politically from
talking about correcting those mistakes. Following through is usually not on the actual agenda.
Take Iraq. Conservatives like very much to talk about all the terrorists we're finging in Iraq (so we don't have to fight them over here.) They are trying to rally failing public support for a wrongheaded war by reminding Americans that terrorists would like us to leave, and that doing so will hand them a victory. The problem with that, of course, is that it is Bush's disasterous war in Iraq which has helped that country to become terrorist training and recruiting grounds on a massive scale. Their solution: Should Bush be held accountable and should we rethink what has been bad policy from the start? Hell no. Score some points by rallying the nation around the need to correct Bush's mistake, only don't remind them it was Bush's mistake.
Or take 9/11. As I wrote last week, it might be impossible to find any large American tragedy which has been politicized more than 9/11. Neither Bush nor his conservative supporters care that four years later bin Laden is still out there. They don't care that the war in Iraq has broken the back of the counterterrorism effort. They don't care that despite more than a hundred billion dollars and four years to prepare, we seem no better ready to deal with a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil than we did four years ago. No, what matters is there is still a boogeyman out there to scare people with, and there's still good politicking to be done with 9/11 and the war on terror. Conservative policy has failed to combat terror, but since the goal was politics rather than actual results, they can declare victory.
So it comes as no surprise that Dick Morris measures the value of relief efforts not in terms of the people who need them, but instead in terms of how much they will help the politicians. It comes as no surprise that rather than expecting Bush to be held accountable for his deadly failures in the wake of Katrina, Morris is already licking his lips thinking about how much Bush can exploit this.
What matters is not how many people have died or the best way to help the people who survived or who exactly is responsible for what. What matters most is how this can help president Bush.
Dick Morris has no soul.
But weep not for Bush. A disaster like Katrina is just what a president needs to anchor his second term and give him relevance and popularity far into his tenure. Not that he wanted it. Not that he handled it well to begin with. Not that he didn't mess it up at the start. But this story will have a happy ending for Bush -- and, we all hope, for the people of New Orleans.
From It Affects You